On the 22nd of February 2011, much of the residential housing stock in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was damaged by an unusually destructive earthquake. Almost all of the houses were insured. We ask whether insurance was able to mitigate the damage adequately, or whether the damage from...

How damaging are uncertainty shocks during extreme events such as the great recession and the Covid-19 outbreak? Can monetary policy limit output losses in such situations? We use a nonlinear VAR framework to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during...

This paper follows the recent literature on real estate price prediction and proposes to take advantage of machine learning techniques to better explain which variables are more important in describing the real estate market evolution. We apply the random forest algorithm on London real estate...

This paper discusses a tool for optimization of econometric models based on genetic algorithms. First, we briefly describe the concept of this optimization technique. Then, we explain the design of a specifically developed algorithm and apply it to a difficult econometric problem, the...

Predicting default probabilities is at the core of credit risk management and is becoming more and more important for banks in order to measure their client's degree of risk, and for firms to operate successfully. The SVM with evolutionary feature selection is applied to the CreditReform...

In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...

Concerns about global warming and growing scarcity of fossile fuels require substantial changes in energy consumption patterns and energy systems, as targeted by many countries around the world. One key element to achieve such transformation is to increase energy efficiency of the housing stock....

There is a broad literature on determinants of house prices, which received increasing attention in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Additional to macroeconomic standard variables, there might be other hard to measure or even unobservable factors influencing real estate price dynamics....

In light of the strong increase of house prices in Switzerland, we analyze the effects of mortgage rate shocks, changes in the interplay between housing demand and supply and GDP growth on house prices for the time period 1981- 2014. We employ Bayesian time-varying coefficients vector...